Passionate about IP! Since June 2003 the IPKat weblog has covered copyright, patent, trade mark, info-tech and privacy/confidentiality issues from a mainly UK and European perspective. The team is David Brophy, Birgit Clark, Merpel, Jeremy Phillips, Eleonora Rosati, Darren Smyth, Annsley Merelle Ward and Neil J. Wilkof. You're welcome to read, post comments and participate in our community. You can email the Kats here

For the half-year to 30 June 2015, the IPKat's regular team is supplemented by contributions from guest bloggers Suleman Ali, Tom Ohta and Valentina Torelli.

Regular round-ups of the previous week's blogposts are kindly compiled by Alberto Bellan.

Thursday, 30 May 2013

A few days ago the IPKat
reported news of last week's decision of stakeholders
representing the research sector, European technology SMEs, and open
publishers to withdraw from the “Licences for Europe” initiative, due
to disagreement over Commission’s approach to text and data mining (TDM).
In particular, in their letter of withdrawal this group of
stakeholders highlighted that

"any meaningful
engagement on the legal framework within which data driven innovation exists
must, as a point of centrality, address the issue of limitations and
exceptions. Having placed licensing as the central pillar of the discussion,
the “Licences for Europe” Working Group has not made this focused evaluation
possible. Instead, the dialogue on limitations and exceptions is only taking
place through the refracted lens of licensing."

An unimpressed Robert Schumann ...

This
Kat agreed that debate about TDM goes well
beyond the topic of licensing, and she concluded her post wondering
how things were going in the Working Group dealing with user-generated
content (UGC), as also this is something that is not confined to the sole
boundaries of licensing.

Her plea for help was promptly answered by a reader who participates in the UGC
Working Group. Writing under the musical nom
de plume of Robert Schumann [which
he/she probably preferred to the possibly overly EU-enthusiastic - yet soundalike - Robert Schuman], he/she provided this engaging (yet possibly worrisome) report from inside the UGC Working
Group:

"Given the IPKat's question
about the progress in the Licences for Europe Working Group on UGC and yesterday's remarks by Commissioner Barnier on the overall progress of the
Licences for Europe exercise, I thought that it would be interesting to give a
brief update on how the discussions on UGC are evolving.

... and a cheerful EUenthusiast Robert Schuman

As someone who participates in the
working group on UGC I am
somewhat baffled by the Commissioner's perception
that the Commission "has established a day-to-day structured dialogue
between those concerned with producing, distributing and using
copyright-protected content."

From the inside of this particular WG
it looks more like the complete opposite.

The 4 meetings that have taken place
so far have been rather unstructured, consisting almost exclusively of various
industry and civil society representatives explaining what they are doing and
what they would consider to be important.

On a number of occasions these
presentations have touched on legal issues related to UGC,
while in other cases they simply consisted of presentations of particular
business models (or complaints about other people's business models).

These presentations inevitably lead
to exchanges of opinion wherein the first participant disagrees with something
that was said in the presentation, which leads to another stakeholder to
disagree with that and so on (until the sandwich lunch is being served - after
which the same exercise begins anew).

This week's meeting saw the
Commission undertake a brave but ultimately half-hearted attempt to shift the
focus of discussion to a number of user cases prepared by civil society
representatives. Of the 10 or so user cases only three could be discussed
(without yielding much new insights) before the allocated time was up (as there
were 3 more business models which needed to be presented).

Kat-inspired Chef's fantasy lunch box

Given this, it is hardly surprising
that after its fourth meeting the working group has yet to identify the actual
problem for which it is supposed to find “specific,
short-term solutions”. While there has not been a mass exodus of
participants comparable to last week’s announcement related to the TDM Working Group, this
makes the overall outlook appear equally grim.

If the Commission wanted to be honest
with itself (and to do everyone involved in the process a huge favour) they
would concede that the setup does not work and shut down the working group (as
well as the one on TDM) at the upcoming mid-term plenary [this is scheduled to take place by 4 July]. Instead they
could focus their time and energy on the other two working groups[on cross-border access and audiovisual heritage institutions]that seem to be
much more productive (in my humble opinion coming up with solutions for two out
of four Licences for Europe issues would be a pretty respectable
outcome)."

Thanks 'Robert' for this report,
which is quite … ehm ... telling. Merpel hopes that at least the sandwich
lunches served during these meetings in Brussels were more substantial than the discussions that seem to have taken place therein.